


What A Daring Dream

by onamaewa



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Biting, Dream Sex, Dubious Consent, Multi, PWP, Pre-Canon, Rough Sex, Threesome - M/M/F, Xeno, no beta we die like PK
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:20:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27337822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onamaewa/pseuds/onamaewa
Summary: The Pale King awakens to a number of surprises.
Relationships: Nightmare King Grimm/The Pale King, Nightmare King Grimm/The Pale King/The Radiance
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	What A Daring Dream

**Author's Note:**

> For context, the timeframe is supposed to be like... sometime before the infection? But definitely after Hallownest is well-established as a Thing.
> 
> Anyway this is probably still OOC but I'm having fun. (I apologize in advance for capslock Radiance.)

There was nothing around him but a haze of crimson, light and textures blending indistinctly with sound and smell. Rough carapace carried him; sharp points curled at his arms and crossed his chest like a harness; something soft as velvet cushioned his back. His legs dangled somewhere vague, his tail draped aside, and a warm weight rested on his shoulder. Hot air hissed gently against his mask, and--

There was something inside him.

From underneath, plates of another's shell shifted and nudged at him, and the points -- the claws, he realized, someone's claws, gripped him a little tighter, just before something thrust into him, shallow and lazy, but still gratifying amid the surreal sensation of reality realigning.

An unfamiliar scent called forth a current of unease that made his plates rise like hackles, twitching. He gasped and startled, fumbling at the arms embracing him, trying to turn his head. He found nothing familiar in his surroundings, at first, but as his mind cleared (as it always did), the corner of the realm revealed itself to him, low-lit and scarlet.

"You awaken at last." The god whose lap the Pale King currently occupied adjusted his grip, whispering at his neck. "I began to wonder if you would at all."

"Nightmare King," the Pale King pronounced, accusatory.

The vessel of the Heart, ruler of the Nightmare Realm, rasped out a laugh like a knife scraped over stone. "Grimm, here, if you'd indulge me."

"Grimm," he amended, "though We intend no indulgence. What is the meaning of this?"

The body beneath him tensed, and with no more warning than the sharpening of Grimm's hold on him, another thrust rippled through the Pale King's body. He jerked slightly, claws twitching, and bit back a hiss.

"Do you like it?" Grimm asked him, in lieu of an answer.

"I..." Yet another slow thrust, and the Pale King forced himself to take a steadying breath. "That. Er. That is..."

"Only when invited do I visit," whispered Grimm. "Had you not thought of such things, I'd have had no cause to attend to you so. Your desires called me forth in your slumber. Be glad my sister did not answer you instead."

One of Grimm's hands crept down the Pale King's abdomen, lingering between his legs and coming to a rest on his inner thigh.

The Pale King's breath hitched again, but he caught it and stilled. "We do not entertain these accusations. This depravity cannot possibly lurk within Us."

"Depravity?" Grimm wheezed softly, chuckling. "You've far lower standards than I, then. Even simple minds carry far darker urges."

"We will not forsake Our Lady in this way."

Grimm squeezed the Pale King's leg, almost affectionately. "Your Root is a breeding creature herself, forever seeking to spread her seed. She'll not begrudge you, and you know it. And still, you've not answered my question." He tilted his head, until it sat perpendicular to his neck, fixed on the king's face. "Do you like it?"

When the Pale King did not answer, Grimm withdrew to sit straight-backed, and for a moment it seemed he would stop. But instead, something twisted and shuddered inside the Pale King's body, where Grimm had entered him, and the member in him swelled and expanded.

The Pale King let out a faint hiss, startled, as the pressure inside grew close to painful. " _Cease_."

"Why deny yourself so?" The agonizing pressure did not stop, jabbing at his insides. "Pain hides pleasure in its release, and in pleasure, the sharpest touch of pain again. The pair dance together as one. You know this, surely. Is it not the way of your kind, after all, to breed and battle as a single act?"

"Not this," he insisted. Something scraped at the tubes of his innards; he flinched, too strongly.

"No?" Grimm stroked a claw along his cheek, tender and taunting.

"It is a challenge--" he heaved an undignified breath. "To which both must rise, lest it be no more than bloodshed." 

He squirmed a little, trying to pull away, but Grimm clung tightly around him, pinning his arms at his sides. The member inside him pulsed, and that traitorous, gratifying spark of arousal burst into full flame. Grimm's purring growl rumbled against him, alien and tantalizing.

"Oh, I know well, Wyrm. I find no joy in partnership with the truly unwilling." He ran a stray, spiderish limb down the Pale King's side, drawing forth a shiver. "But the heart bears as many desires as fears, and the Heart knows them all."

"We shall offer no gracing rebuke to--"

Above them, the dream shifted. Like a sunrise transforming from the barest red haze on the horizon to a gleaming dawn, a light emerged, a glowing resplendent orb.

Grimm groaned. The Pale King felt his hearts turn cold.

"Of course," Grimm muttered. "Of course she arrives now."

The orb spread its wings, and coalesced into a living form. "WHAT A DISCOVERY," it intoned, in a voice like a golden choir.

"Do you mind, sister?" Grimm's cape crept around the Pale King as if of its own volition, with the petulant possessiveness of a grub guarding a prize from their demanding sibling.

"DEEPLY," replied the Radiance, the Old Light, staring down upon them. Her gaze focused laser-sharp on the Pale King, and he did his best not to tremble.

The Pale King, refusing to be held and displayed like a fought-over trophy, wriggled until Grimm's distracted grip loosened, and forced Grimm's arms to around his waist like a belt. He puffed up his chest with as much semblance of bedraggled dignity as he could with the Nightmare King's member still swollen inside him, and stared her straight in the eye. "We are surprised to see you live, Old Light," he began, forcing his voice to level.

"AS AM I DISMAYED TO FIND YOU WELL, FOUL WYRM."

He bit back a wince. "This dream is no more Our desire than yours. We intend no battle on these grounds."

"IF ONLY I CARED FOR YOUR DESIRES." The Radiance's wings rippled, and her eyes flared brightly.

"If only, indeed," mused Grimm, patting the Pale King's lap. The claws crept dangerously close to his slit, from which, the Pale King realized with a jolt of horror and self-loathing, his own member had begun to emerge like a growing bud.

The Radiance seemed to take notice of this, and swept down on writhing wings to hover above them both like some massive spectre.

"DID YOU PUT HIM UP TO THIS, BROTHER?" Her lamplight eyes stared them each down with nearly equal distaste. "OR HAS THE UPSTART USURPER SEDUCED YOU AS A MORTAL MIGHT?"

"Who am I, if not one who heeds another's call?" Grimm purred, idly playing a claw over the Pale King's jaw. The Pale King, for his part, snapped his mandibles at him, missing by the narrowest of margins, and provoking little more than a raspy chuckle and another thrust from beneath. "How close he lives and lies by the brink of ruin. He'll be mine within centuries, if not sooner."

"Lies." The Pale King scowled, his ire suddenly redirected once more. "Our kingdom lasts eternal."

"YOUR INSIGNIFICANT EMPIRE WILL BURN BY THE RISING SUN."

"No dawn will touch your scales ere they fade. It is only a matter of time."

"I believe that's my line," Grimm interrupted, sounding faintly amused.

The Radiance shook with what might have been laughter, if another of her kind remained to interpret. "THE WORDS OF MY KIN HOLD NO LESS TRUE. YOUR KINGDOM LIVES BOUND FOR RUIN. I SHALL EMERGE RENEWED AND REBORN, AND ALL MY ENEMIES LAID TO WASTE BEFORE ME. A CONCEPT OF A GOD IS IMMORTAL."

Grimm scoffed. "You're a fool, sister dearest, to twist my words so. We've argued this since our conception. All is dust and ash in time, no matter how one seeks to preserve it."

"I WILL TAKE NO ACCUSATION FROM HE WHO SETS HIMSELF IMPATIENTLY ALIGHT WHEN HE CANNOT STAND THE FACE OF ETERNITY."

"It was not I who cast my sibling from the realm, for the corpse to drag itself free of the cinders. You never did learn to adapt. Perhaps that aided your defeat."

"I AM NOT," growled the Radiance, "DEFEATED, BY THIS _PEST_." The rage of the sun itself thrummed through her, rolling off in glowing waves as she loomed closer and closer in the air, until her ruff just brushed against the tips of the Pale King's horned crown.

The Pale King pushed off against Grimm's legs, straining against spindly arms to press his crown prongs into the Radiance's thorax. "Begone, moth. A dream is but vanishing memory in the mind awakened. Neither insult nor insistence will reclaim your worshipers from a will freely given."

The Old Light's rage grew to incandescent fury. "INSOLENT CREATURE," she bellowed. "THIEVING, CRAWLING EXCUSE OF DIVINITY."

"Are we not all thieves and upstarts once in our lives?" the Pale King snapped back. "Inheritance, salvage, conquest, all to the same end. No god ascended is born of nothing."

"YOU WOULD DO WELL," the Radiance told him, in a voice suddenly low and steely, "TO RECALL WHOSE DOMAIN YOU INHABIT."

The Pale King hissed. "We shall carry this dialogue and debauchery no further. It is time We awoke-- _ngk!_ "

In a move entirely unexpected, the Radiance pressed the sharp, narrow gap of her bladed legs to his groin, leaned so close her thorax practically lay over his shoulder. Her head above him, her ruff filled his vision and drowned his face in feathery hairs in which his jaws could find no purchase, while a touch hot and metallic scraped against his sensitive emerging member.

Grimm wheezed behind him, his claws sliding up the Pale King's middle to make room for the Radiance's advances. "My, my, Wyrm. A busy god you'll be tonight, it seems."

The Radiance forced herself forward, and Grimm flicked his hips under him, a little faster than before, starting into a rhythm, back and forth. The Pale King made a strangled squeaking sound, now occupied from both sides; Grimm's cock pulsed inside him as the Radiance's short clasping limbs unfolded from her abdomen to pull roughly at the tip of his own, and the combination nearly had him seeing stars.

He squirmed again, trying to pull away, but the claspers clung tightly to him now, and Grimm's grip did not allow him any leeway. The member inside him dug deeper, and his cock finally burst free of its sheath, directly into where the Radiance had pressed her body to his. He could feel the internal texture of her slit, more intimately than he had ever wanted to consider, squeezing and clamping around him, and his mind blurred with a burst of foreign pheromones mingling with his own.

The Radiance shoved against him roughly, as much a blow as an act of coupling. Her mandibles closed around one of his horns, and the Pale King hissed again as she bit down, not hard enough to snap the shell, but enough to dent it. As if in reply, or as an echo, Grimm leaned in and nipped at his temple with his jagged vertical jaws. The rush of artificial terror that accompanied it came as an involuntary thrill, bringing the next pulse of the engorged cock inside him and the gripping sheath around him to a new, wild height.

At some point, the pain of Grimm's size inside him had dulled amid the pleasure, still persistent and piercing when least expected, but no longer a constant companion. The Radiance's viselike grip on him from the front made up for it. A small primal part of him tried to panic, each time she clenched around him, half-afraid she wouldn't stop, but the relief bordered on soothing in a way he did not know how to feel about.

"What purpose does this serve you, Old Light?! What memory, what legend do you gain of--" the Pale King's breath caught here, as another heave of the bodies fore and aft of him sent lightning through his vision. "--of--?"

"OF BREEDING THE UPSTART CONQUEROR WHO STOLE MY CROWN?"

She punctuated her words with an especially forceful push against him, straining his plates as he found himself increasingly squashed between her and Grimm.

"Careful now, sister," Grimm chided her. "He's delicate."

The Pale King chittered indignantly, and bucked against the Radiance's legs with renewed energy. "Taunts and slander. Had We but a trace of Our greater form, your concerns would be opposite by far."

"Tempting, but I must decline. Your stature lends your tight-strung nerves such flavor."

"I WOULD TRIUMPH NO MATTER YOUR SIZE. YOUR DOMAIN LIES DISTANT AMONG THE WAKING."

A purr rattled inside Grimm's thorax, vibrating against the Pale King's back. "Does it surprise you, that I'd be the gentler of us?" he asked, scratching just under the king's jaw, where he could not bite. "Ah, if only I could smell you. I'm afraid this body knows little of any scent beyond fear."

The Pale King was sure he positively reeked of arousal by now, thick and frantic and mortifying, but he did not reply, instead focusing on another unsteady breath as something reached a tipping point within him. His hips rocked and followed the motion of both partners without any conscious effort, driven purely by instinct as the flood of scent and sensation momentarily overwhelmed him.

"LOOK AT HIM. PATHETIC." The Radiance dug her mandibles around the base of one of Pale King's horns, a blunt, intensifying pressure that melted into the rest of the desires and sensations writhing through his body, eliciting a low, gasping hiss. "HE'LL NOT LAST A MOMENT LONGER."

She was right, as much as he hated to admit it. A moment later, he reached the apex of the act, a final, humiliatingly desperate thrust and release into the Radiance's body. He could feel the warm fluid pooling at the tip of his member, stoppered inside her like the cork in a bottle, but no longer possessed the energy to wriggle himself free.

Grimm's presence inside him turned painful and keen again, like a blade in his bowels, for several more seconds before he brought himself to climax next. A snarling moan rolled over the Pale King's shoulder as fangs scraped his crown, leaving thin scratches in the chitin. Liquid heat surged up through his abdomen and sent his tail twitching, and then the cock inside him finally began to relax, the pressing urgency deflating into a softer, simpler obstruction.

The Pale King sat dazed and limp in Grimm's lap. The Radiance's grip on him twinged and ached, though instinct told him to keep quiet and leave her to finish. To trouble a mate after coitus was a recipe for untimely death in the jaws of one's ravenous former partner. Although he suspected this habit uncommon for her kind, he was in no position to test it, least of all in a foreign realm and so deeply compromised.

Grimm trailed a claw along the Pale King's face, tracing around the arc of his cheek. It took less effort than it should have not to flinch. "Was that really so bad?" he asked. 

His eyes tracked the horizon, distant and burning. Blood rushed in the Pale King's head like a drumbeat. The pressure at his groin spiked again, though not pleasantly, in the wake of release.

"Was it truly such an ordeal, to bring your desires into the open?" His claw stopped just under the Pale King's eye, and pressed there, drawing a line down like a tear-track. "To face your heart? Your fear?"

The world slipped away before he could answer.

***

He lay amid his Root's tendrils, the room dimmed down to the light of their own bodies, tangled together in slumber. Her gentle glow surrounded him, fair as moonstone, twining like a smithy's wrought-iron craft made alive and giving.

As his bleary awareness returned to him, he found his underside sticky with fluid drying cold against his shell. Had he actually...?

He had seen her. The Old Light, whom he had once challenged and claimed the lands of, long ago, back when Hallownest was but a phantom glimpsed of the future, pieced together by inspiration and foresight. He had... coupled with her? And with the King of Nightmares, that dreaded scavenger who circled the wastes, devouring the rot and wreckage of temporary kingdoms.

(He had been warned of him once, as a young Wyrm first setting out. The Nightmare King was an omen, and a hungry one. To chase him off was not enough; he had no need to linger in a land not yet dead, but knew by preternatural sense, as sure as a Wyrm's knowledge of things to come, which lands would feed him soon and well.)

Dwelling on the dream disturbed him too greatly to think of it for long, but the thought of returning to sleep, at the risk of dreaming again, equally distressed him. And the implication that the Light yet lived, surviving in some ethereal form beyond his reach...

He resolved to remain at his Root's side until morning, awake. In the meantime, he would consider the future, and see what might be done.

And if anyone worth answering asked how he had learned of this, he would choose his words very, very carefully.

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be darker but the NKG/Radiance conversation kept devolving into sibling bickering, haha.
> 
> Fun fact: most moths don't have mandibles, but there are a couple of really weird archaic species that do? So yeah I'm giving Radi mandibles because why not. Bitey bitey amirite. Also yeah I know it's generally male moths that have claspers but fuckit, they're all gods and I'll go as buck wild as I want to (even if that's honestly probably not that wild at all.)


End file.
